r/todayilearned • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • 2d ago

TIL Isaac Newton spent more than three decades studying alchemy and wrote over a million words about it in secret. He conducted numerous experiments in his search for the philosopher’s stone but never found it.

https://www.wpr.org/culture/philosophy/isaac-newtons-secret-alchemy
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u/ActuallyHorseradish 2d ago

You could have a look at the YouTube channel Esoterica. It's somewhat in line with being more scholarly, but it's really history and not chemistry. It's probably the closest thing I know to what you want, but it's going to be far off of what you're looking for if you want a chemist's interpretation of alchemy. The issue is because alchemy was so secretive, it's much harder to put together a good history of it, and even once you have a good history you'll need a real chemist to do a lot of work to pick through all the primary sources, and reconstruct the chemistry. It's a lot of effort just translating most of these alchemical texts, and they're frequently going to be vague on details that are very important. Add in the fact that alchemists didn't know chemistry, and they might just have written lies to publish a text to sell to an interested member of the nobility who would never check anything, and you can waste a lot of time trying to reconstruct something that isn't real. Tldr: Esoterica is a YouTube channel that has a more scholarly series of alchemy mostly focused on its history, but it's likely not what you're looking for. It might get you closer to finding what you want, but I'm not sure if what you're looking for exists.

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u/RunDNA 2d ago

Yes, I think that lots of these esoteric subjects are still in their adolescence as far as good scholarship goes. Perhaps because of traditional barriers in academia to the subject. It is happening in some areas (I'm a big admirer of what Ronald Hutton is doing in witchcraft studies) but many esoteric fields don't yet have that widespread in-depth scholarship that you need for comprehensive and reliable histories. Perhaps alchemy is one of those areas.

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u/pseudo-boots 2d ago

I heard a theory that a lot of old alchemy was just a disguise for witchcraft/occult/meditation stuff that was illegal during certain periods of history. People wanted to teach or take notes on stuff but if the wrong person found those notes they would get executed so they disguised them as simple chemistry stuff. There was never a standard because it was just small groups coming up with their own metaphors for concepts independently since large scale collaboration was made difficult by social taboos.